They’re also building more new coal plants than the rest of the world combined. Hundreds of new plants.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40935688 ("HN: China's clean energy pushes coal to record-low 53% share of power in May 2024")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40919052 ("HN: China's Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts")
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/05/15/china-switches-on-fir... ("China switches on first large-scale sodium-ion battery")
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-15/top-pollu... | https://archive.today/wioou ("Top Polluter China’s Shrinking Emissions Put Carbon Peak in Play")
Those coal generators will end up as stranded assets (I believe the Chinese term is "tofu dreg"), and China is ramping battery storage deployments to firm renewables.
Tofu dreg buildings aren't stranded assets, they're (usually) buildings that have such low built quality that they're unusable. I.e having concrete walls you can rip parts out of with a single bare hand, skipping foundation entirely, making the whole thing topple over, creating drains that just end within a few cm etc
It's gonna be spicy if you've got a tofu dreg coal power plant
High coal prices mean that most coal plants in China are operating at a loss. In 2018, almost 50% had a net financial loss.2 Things have only gotten worse: data from the China Electricity Council suggests that more than half of its large coal firms made a loss in the first half of 2022.
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China is offering ‘capacity payments’ to power plants to keep them online. This provides plants with a source of income even when they’re not being used. Some project that by the end of the decade many coal plants will be making more money from not running than actually producing power. This seems credible if we look at the tumbling capacity factors expected from S&P over the next few decades.
https://energynews.us/2013/06/17/explainer-how-capacity-mark...
Australia is also taking losses on its coal generation, and building out batteries at a tremendous rate.
> Australia’s rapid shift from coal-fired power to cleaner alternatives is underwriting a boom in battery projects able to store solar and wind energy.
> The country has at least 250 planned battery developments with a potential capacity of almost 130,000 megawatt-hours, a pipeline that’s second only to China, data compiled by BloombergNEF show. While Australia still relies on coal for more than half of its electricity generation, many major plants are set to close in the next decade.
> “Operating a reliable low-carbon power system means that energy storage is imperative,” and investments are becoming “more urgent” as proposals to shutter coal assets accelerate, said Tim Jordan, commissioner of the Australian Energy Market Commission, the government’s adviser on energy policy.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-07/end-of-co... | https://archive.today/2owbd
So, the coal plants are unpleasant, but they are not long for this world, as the global renewables and storage deployment flywheel comes up to speed.
and will keep dropping. At the moment there's a load of capacity coming along, about 3x current demand which will probably lead to considearably lower prices and more batteries https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-...
2. They’re built to be able to ramp up/down fairly rapidly so they can be used as backup for renewables. Just because they build them doesn’t mean they will run at 100% capacity.
3. Chinas economy is slowing down. Probably more than official numbers would have you believe.
As touched on in the other commenters, nothing points at an impending huge growth in the actual amount of coal being burnt.
But sure, the number of coal power plants being built/planned is worrying. We should keep the pressure up.
Which makes sense because China's primary goal is energy independence, not decarbonization. China has lots of thermal coal, they don't need to import it, unlike gas or metallurgical coal.
Total coal use was 82.4 exajules in 2013 and 82.5 exajules in 2019. It’s increased since then, but nothing like the number of power plants they have added. https://www.statista.com/statistics/265491/chinese-coal-cons...